Technical Readiness of Prescriptive Analytics Platforms: A Survey

Decision-making is the process of selecting a course of action from several alternatives on the basis of preferences, values and available information. As decisions become increasingly complex, the use of data for decision-making is on the rise. The growing popularity of data-driven decision-making has led to the launch of countless data analytics platforms and in particular prescriptive platforms for decision support. Prescriptive analytics is the highest form of data analytics, which aims to find the optimal action for a given situation. The main focus of this paper is to provide a deep insight into the state-of-the-art of existing prescriptive platforms. To this end, we survey the prescriptive research landscape in all domains and highlight which data, protocols, databases, and algorithms the respective platforms work with to provide reasonable actions. We further review the level of readiness in terms of the status of implementation and usability of the proposed action. In addition, we derive a framework for prescriptive platforms that can potentially help readers to make an informed decision about the right choice of platform, depending on their needs.